April 06, 2012

Rez Life avoids poverty porn

By Heather SteinbergerWhen anthropologist and novelist David Treuer heard that 16-year-old high-school student Jeff Weise had killed nine people and then himself on northern Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation on March 21, 2005, he was utterly dismayed—and not only because this was the worst school shooting since the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. He was also appalled at how the story was being told.

“When you compare it to Columbine, the story was presented in such a different way,” recalls Treuer, an Ojibwe Indian who grew up on the nearby Leech Lake reservation. “No one evoked race, class or geography with Columbine. When I talked to my editor, I was so angry…as if [those three factors] explained what happened! The way the story was told, it didn’t begin to explain Red Lake. My editor said, ‘Then what’s the story? And who will write it?’

“I said, ‘I’ll do it. I don’t know what the story is, but it’s not that.”

So began Treuer’s road to Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life, which Atlantic Monthly Press published in February. The book, which took him five years to research and write, blends history, journalism and memoir as he explores—and celebrates—the complexity of America’s reservations, delving into issues such as tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, gaming, public policy and the relationship between Native peoples, the states in which their reservations lie and the U.S. government.

“Writing this book was hard,” he says. “I’m not interested in platitudes. I want to tell the real story; [life on the reservation is] no single experience. I’m so sick of poverty porn…rez porn.… And it really makes me mad to watch people ‘cathart’ about how awful it is.

“We [Native people] are not exempt either. We’re all trained to see one thing. I wanted the book to look at things differently.”And:Through his own connections to reservation life, and through his exhaustive research, Treuer says he uncovered an important truth about reservations, one that is not often addressed when the mainstream media remains focused on poverty and social ills. “The thing about reservations is that they creatively and chaotically continue to live, and that is no small achievement. That our communities continue to survive is miraculous. The story is not what we have lost, but what we have maintained.”

Yet there are threats. Treuer says one of the largest is assimilation. “No one wants to have a frank discussion about it. It’s divisive. [But] a lot of our real-world issues stem from our families becoming weak, from losing our language and culture. We didn’t have control for so long, and that’s still ongoing. We need to frame ourselves and our problems in our own language.”

In other words, taking control means more than fighting for better government representation and building successful local economies. It means reclaiming a sense of self and of community that lies deeper than race. Cultural identity, Treuer notes, is not the same as ethnicity.

A related threat is how Native people define themselves. According to Treuer, the current popular definitions aren’t working. “Everyone thinks poor equals Indian. As a middle-class Indian, I don’t agree. And people think rez equals Indian, but…there’s a diaspora. It’s ridiculous.”Comment: For examples of poverty porn, see the SCALPED comic book and the Children of the Plains TV special.